O’Donnell wrote a letter Monday accusing administrators “at the highest levels” of UT Austin and the system of blocking his efforts to get data that reveal an increasing share of tuition and taxpayer dollars going to professors and administrators who do little teaching.

O’Donnell sent the letter to Wallace Hall, a UT regent from Dallas who chairs a task force on online learning that O’Donnell was hired to facilitate.

In it, O’Donnell pits UT staff and administrators against regents, accusing UT employees of stoking the drama to divert attention from reform efforts that would shake up the status quo.

“Rather than release the data, we were met with what some have called a well-orchestrated public relations campaign of breathless alarms, much like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater,” O’Donnell wrote, referring to letters by students, donors and alumni questioning the direction of regents’ leadership.

His termination comes less than a week after an Express-News analysis of a white paper O’Donnell wrote, while he was working for a conservative Austin-based think tank, found that his findings and citations were seriously flawed. The paper was was written to provide support for Jeff Sandefer’s plan for an education overhaul,.

Also, in the last week, the Houston Chronicle reported that the Governor’s Office’s was significantly more involved in pushing this education overhaul — again, backed by Sandefer — than Governor Rick Perry’s comments had previously indicated.

The embedded file below is a copy of his letter to a regent, which he sent Monday, that slams the UT System.

Last week, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News analyzed a controversial white paper written by Rick O’Donnell, which supported an overhaul of public higher education spearheaded by Jeff Sandefer, and found a number of significant errors in the paper’s claims and how he attributed his information.